Sunshine Coast Embraces Circular Economy Principles

The Circular Experiment is a Sunshine Coast based business formed to assist small businesses to both reduce their costs and improve their profits by better planning and management of materials and resources used during their operation through the implementation of circular economy principles; Resource efficiency, incentivised return, servitisation, return logistics, asset management, and innovative technology solutions.

The Circular Experiment is the brain child of two local Sunshine Coast sisters, Jaine and Ashleigh Morris. Ashleigh was alive with equal amounts of passion and frustration about Australia’s current economic climate and was trying to find her path moving forward, at this stage Jaine was intent on living an authentic life and giving back to her local community. In a perfect combination of timing and gumption the sisters decided that the time was now for Australia to embrace circularity and if no one else was going to step up and drive it forward then they would. From that fateful day in March The Circular Experiment, driven by Jaine and Ashleigh’s incredible hard work and tenacity, has progressed from strength to strength.

Ocean Street in the CBD of the Sunshine Coast has been selected for The Circular Experiment’s first 6-month proof of concept business project. The Ocean Street Project will work at the street and individual business level to assess, plan, implement and evaluate the application of circular economy principles. Ocean Street has over 50 diverse small businesses from cafes to hairdressers that present different inputs and outputs and require unique solutions. As these businesses are common in shopping precincts across Australia the outcomes and solutions are intended to be used to design a business model that can be applied at scale.

“Where does your product end up?” Ashleigh poses this question to businesses along the supply chain and is often met with a shrug of the shoulders or dismissive gazes. In an effort to answer his question and reduce the amount of food waste being landfilled from Ocean Street, The Circular Experiment has collaborated with Spare Harvest, a sharing platform designed to be the initial stop gap in the creation of food waste and with Earth Born in Palmwoods, to turn the remaining food scraps and biodegradable packaging into high quality compost. “Thinking about food ‘waste’ as a resource has enabled us to look at where we can create value at all stops along the supply chain and keep this resource circulating in the system – a core value underpinning the circular economy.” Jaine says.